Two mass spectrometry meetings in May and June provided opportunities for interested parties to discuss the multiplicity of terms used to designate the technique of continuously measuring, through time, the intensities of one or more preselected ions. Terms designating the associated experimental record were also compared and evaluated.
The discussion at the Twenty-Third Annual Conference of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (Houston, Texas, 25th to 30th May) was held under the auspices of that society's Committee for Biological Applications. The second discussion was led by Drs J. T. Watson and J. Sjovall at the International Symposium on Mass Spectrometry in Biochemistry and Medicine held in Alghero, Sardinia, Italy, 16th to 18th June. In both cases, a report of the discussion had been requested by and was submitted to the IUPAC Subcommission which has been established to review and recommend Terms and Definitions in Mass Spectrometry.
At both meetings there was unanimous agreement that a single term for the technique and a single related term for the data should be brought into general usage, in place of the more than two dozen designations currently in the literature. Most discussants also agreed that such a term should be general enough to include all the variations in instruments and in the methodology of the measurements, including ion intensity profiles reconstructed by computer from rapid repetitive scans as well as those recorded directly, and also including samples introduced by direct probe as well as by the gas chromatograph.
Recommendations were made at both meetings that, rather than consisting of jargon, the terms designating